Posts tagged: google news

Over the weekend it appears that Google has made a rather interesting update to their news cluster results – the little block of news articles that sometimes accompanies a search in regular google searches – on several fronts including the name, the actual websites allowed to appear in the new box and the frequency of the box’s appearance. Read more →

This afternoon John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst announced via his Google+ account that Google will be reconfiguring how authorship data is displayed in Google Universal and Google News SERPs.

The rollout is expected to happen shortly, and articles that have Authorship established in Google SERPs will no longer have the author’s Read more →

Yesterday, Gawker Media owner Nick Denton sent out a memo to all staff notifying them that they must limit their headline character count to 70 or less in direct relation to the site’s ability to rank in Google. The memo Read more →

Google has launched a new META keyword tag <meta name=”news_keywords”> specifically for news websites to provide a better contextual understanding of the news topic and focus for the article, while allowing the writers the freedom to be more creative with their headlines and grab a reader’s attention.

Today, Google begins rolling out some updates to the U.S. Edition of Google News including scrolling real-time news updates, larger image sizes for accompanying thumbnails and additional integration of Google+ posts and comments for logged in G+ users.

Visually, the most striking and eye-catching update is the redesign of the Google News homepage and the Top Stories pages. Read more →

This week a new website, http://googlenewsrankingfactors.com, was launched to outline the positive and negative things that news publication websites can do to rank in Google News. This information is based on a survey of the top SEO experts in the field of news optimization, including Advance Internet’s own John Carcutt, who was hand selected to participate.

The website includes essential information such as:

Top 10 Most Important Google News Ranking Factors

Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors

Article Page Keyword Factors

Article Page Non-Keyword Factors

Time-Based Factors

The following is a press release published in coordination with the launch of the website.

How Does an Article Get to the Top of Google News?

PASADENA, CA—(Marketwire – Sep 22, 2011) – Today at the Online News Association conference in Boston, MA, Perfect Market, Inc., Local SEO Guide and Newsknife released a new survey detailing never before seen insights into how articles are ranked by Google News — www.googlenewsrankingfactors.com. Respondents included the news publishing industry’s most influential online strategists. Participating news SEOs have worked with publishers including The New York Times Company, The Tribune Company, Time Warner and Conde Nast.

The result of the survey is a list of the “Top Ten Most Important Google News Ranking Factors,” including tactical approaches and insider commentary on emerging trends. The report reveals many new insights about how to get content ranked highly on Google News and also clarifies myths and misperceptions around how articles make it to the top of the Google News page.

News ranking factors may surprise many online strategists. Unlike ranking factors in Google.com, where domain authority is widely believed to carry influence, ‘category authority’ is “massively important” when determining Google News rank. Similarly, ‘authority’ matters, but it’s much more likely the category focus of the site pulls more weight within the news ranking algorithm.

Other insights from the survey include the fact that being the first to publish isn’t necessarily important when determining Google News rank while neither is the publisher’s authority.

Commentary:“Media companies are particularly interested in learning more about the ins and outs of Google News ranking factors, which are quite different than the standard Page Rank algorithms associated with web search optimization,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer, Perfect Market. “News SEO requires an intricate, specialized understanding. My colleague Sheigh Crabtree and I are grateful to the news SEO experts who participated in this survey, lent us their expertise and helped form the analysis for this groundbreaking research.”

“Ranking for top stories in Google News is the Holy Grail for news sites, yet there has been little public discussion within the SEO community of how to do it,” said Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide. “As an SEO consultant who has worked on some of the largest news brands in the world, I thought others would benefit from asking some of the best SEOs out there to share their knowledge of how Google News works.”

“Clearly news publications that rank consistently at the top of Newsknife spend effort to get there,” said Neil Pharazyn, founder of Newsknife. “These Google News ranking factor insights will give news SEOs a better focus on what works.”